But when the norteamericano finally appeared, his face floated in the air, and she could not lift her voice to reach him. For a moment she fought the growing shadows. Far away, a woman cried. Was it a dream? And then she surrendered, encircled by the mist.
MADISON
Pleading another appointment, Maddie turned down Meredith’s invitation for lunch. Once she was outside the college and in the fresh air, the lingering effects of the Ambien dissipated. By the time she got home, she felt stronger, steadier, the weird episode or panic attack or whatever it had been pushed from her memory.
She unloaded the projector and slide cartridge and then went upstairs to strip off her bra and change into jeans and an old cotton smock she used for working in the studio. She was reaching for the smock when she again saw Jack’s shirt in the closet. Instantly she flashed to the day she had ended things with him. The final fight. “I thought you were dead. I thought you were in the crash,” she’d screamed, still caught in the grief and pain of losing him. He had crossed the room to her, and she’d been swept by the immense relief of seeing him, being in his arms.
“I had to divert to an alternate airport,” he’d explained again.
“You should have called.” How could he not have called to tell her he was safe? He knew her history. Knew what she must have been thinking. It was unforgivable that he hadn’t phoned, had put her through hell. Relief was replaced by anger. How could he have not called?
The phone rang, pulling her from the memory.
“You’re a hard one to get hold of,” Lonnie said.
“I was at the college.”
“You need to get a cell. Join the modern world.”
“So you say.” Both Lonnie and Kat were always pushing her to get a cell phone. She saw no need.
“What were you doing at the college?”
“A good question. In a weak moment, I promised Meredith I’d do a slideshow for her class.” She plopped down on the bed.
“Oh, you have weak moments, do you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I thought you were steel, unbending. That’s what I hear.”
“Jack? That’s what this is about? That’s why you called?”
“What happened, Maddie? You seemed so happy and then—bam—it’s over. Closed book.”
“What are you, his mother?”
“You know he’s in love with you.”
“What? He told you that?” She was unprepared to hear this and wished Lonnie hadn’t told her.
“As a matter of fact, he did.”
“So you’re his confessor, too?”
“Maddie, sweetheart. I’ve known Jack since he was a boy. I’m like a second mother. He had to talk to someone, and I’m glad it was me. Look, he only told me his side of the story, and since you won’t talk about it, that’s all I’ve heard. God knows how traumatic it was for you when you thought he’d crashed, but he didn’t. That’s the thing, Maddie. He didn’t crash. He’s alive and he wants to be with you. And I saw how you were with him. How he made you laugh. He’s one of the good guys. I can’t believe you’d throw away that chance at life.”
“In case you didn’t notice,” Maddie said, her voice stiff, “I already have a life.”
“I didn’t say a life, Maddie. I said life.”
She waited a beat. “I don’t want to argue, Lonnie.”
“Oh, Maddie. Just think about it. What is life but a marriage of change and chance? Change is inevitable. Chance is frivolous, a series of what-ifs, a throw of the dice we don’t even know have been cast. You’re not the only one with pain, Maddie. I’ve watched Jack grow up, seen him work for everything he has, watched the way he stepped in after his father left, and seen the way he’s been there for his mother and his sister. One thing I know for sure about Jack is that he is worth the gamble.”
Jack. A man who was devoted to his dying sister. A Renaissance man who played jazz and the blues and created exquisite paper sculptures. A man who had seen her as a warrior woman, who thought she was beautiful in spite of her scarred face and body.
Jack. The handsome twenty-six-year-old who no doubt had women lining up to be with him, who was a pilot and put his life in peril with every flight, no matter how safe he believed flying was. Jack who hadn’t thought to call her to let her know he was alive and safe.
Maddie felt a wave of exhaustion.
“He misses you, Maddie. He’s hurt.”
Maddie let the silence on her end swell.
“He really loves you.”
“He just thinks he does.” She stood up, as if a movement would settle her heart, quench the flash of desire. She couldn’t afford to get weak-willed. “He’ll get over it.”
KATHERINE
Kat no longer held out any hope that Verner would help her. If she was ever going to return to her life in DC, she would have to find a way to do it herself. She was working on that. She devised a Plan A, a Plan B, and, although this was least likely, a plan she called Omega. One way or another, she would get out of there.
On the days when she felt strong and clever enough to avoid the drugs dissolved in her food, her old fierceness would surface as if it had only been asleep and gathering strength. She would pass the long hours mentally documenting everything she knew about Verner and what he did here. The pregnant girls he brought here. His procedures. Not just unethical. Insane. She had no paper, pens, or pencils, but she imagined a notebook in her mind, and there she wrote, remembering details, forming sentences, laying out the framework of the story she would tell once she got out of there. She would lead with her experience in December during her first visit to Retirada de la Playa, which she’d imagined would lead to a story and would also be a chance for some rest and rejuvenation after a difficult year in which she had gone through another breakup and two of her pieces, done on spec, had been rejected. She would candidly document how she had been seduced by the elegance of the spa and by Verner’s promise that aging could be delayed. Now, after the fact, she wondered how she could have bought what he was selling. Had she left her brains at the door? During her stint as a consumer reporter she knew well the validity of the axiom that if something was too good to be true, it probably was. And yet, perhaps still feeling the sting of the previous year’s rejections, she had succumbed to his promises.
She would write about her return in January, when she’d had the first in the monthly series of shots that were central to his treatment, injections he had maintained were a combination of vitamins and vital minerals that declined as one aged, as well as an infusion of plasma culled from young blood and a cocktail injection of human growth hormone. He had supplied the guests with papers declaring the efficacy of the last. And another shot when she returned in March. The readers, drawn in just as she had been, would learn how in April, she began to notice changes, but not those Verner had promised. Her hairdresser remarked on it, too. “You need to hydrate, honey,” she’d told her. “And sugar is death for the complexion. Hydrate and avoid sugar if you want to keep your skin in good shape. And consider Rogaine for the hair loss.”
When he entered the room, she turned her face away and waited while he conducted his evaluation. They rarely spoke to each other now. She closed her eyes and floated off while he examined her, heard him speak to Mercer, their voices devoid of emotion, cool, without remorse. They were a pair, the two of them. He ordered more blood. What good could that possibly do? She opened her eyes and looked down at her arm, the thin skin bruised purple from the needles. More blood. Verner the Vampire. But even as she shrank from his touch, even now some part of her held out hope that he would be able to find a solution. Like a doomed man, hoping the noose would break before his neck snapped, she thought wryly. Stubborn, she had been called in the past, but her hope was based, she knew, on a fierce desire to live.
Once he was done with her, he patted her shoulder in a fake gesture of concern and left the room. Before Mercer followed him, she handed Kat the usual white pill. Dutifully
she took it and pretended to swallow. Feign resignation. Lure them into complacency. When she looked up, she found Mercer’s eyes on her. She knew she must be careful because Mercer was more difficult to fool than the local Mayan women, more suspicious. She had asked Kat to open her mouth and checked to see that the pill was swallowed, but Kat had learned the trick of tucking the pill up by the gum line by her back tooth. Once, uncharacteristically, Mercer had changed the sheets on the bed, had even flipped the mattress over, although menial tasks were far beneath her. Kat had been grateful she had hidden the stash of pills so cleverly. She fell back on the pillow and closed her eyes, feigning sleep while she waited for Mercer to leave. When she was sure she was alone, she retrieved the white pill and wiped it dry on her gown. Holding it in the palm of her hand, she allowed herself a nod of satisfaction.
The bed had a simple metal frame. Two square posts at the head, side slats, two more posts at the foot. The posts were capped at the top, and she had discovered she could pry off one with the spoon she had slipped from a dinner tray. The post on the left held her stash, wrapped in a length of toilet paper. Now she wedged off the top and experienced a flush of relief when she saw the square of white. She always feared the wadded paper would become dislodged and slip down into the hollow post. She unfolded the paper. She now had five pills. She did not know how many would be enough. Twenty? She settled on thirty to be sure. The pills were her Plan Omega. She would fight to escape. That was Plan A. But if that failed, she would at least be in control of how she died.
But even when reviewing this desperate plan, she would think of the story she needed to tell, that the world outside needed to know, and her determination to escape returned. And when she thought of Maddie, a fierce no to the pills would vibrate inside her chest, breaking through the shroud of despair, a mandate forcing her to fight, to hold on. When this happened, she would think out the exposé she would write and would review the ways she might get out of there.
She didn’t know which of the two would prove her eventual release: her escape or the pills.
MADISON
She hadn’t expected Lonnie to understand why she couldn’t continue with Jack. Certainly Jack hadn’t been able to. As she had throughout her life and especially after their parents had died, she knew the only one she could turn to and trust was Kat. Kat would understand everything. Maddie felt a longing for her sister that was physical. The house echoed, as empty and claustrophobic as a tomb.
She checked the time. Eleven fifteen. Too late? But Kat was a night owl. Always had been. She called the cell first and then, when there was no answer, Maddie tried to quell her rising anxiety. Kat was probably on assignment. Hadn’t she said that during their last conversation? She was always flying away, off to distant locations in search of a story readers would love. Maddie searched her memory. She tried to recall whether Kat had mentioned specifics about her plans. The fault was Maddie’s. She had been so wrapped up with Jack that she had ignored almost everything else outside the studio. Jack and her work. The past days and weeks had gone by in a rainbow spectrum of passion and play. But that was no excuse. How had she let the time elapse without questioning the silence from Kat’s end?
The last conversation she could remember was when she had told Kat about Jack being a pilot. She remembered how Kat had let a silence stretch on a bit after Maddie had told her about him. She had waited for the inevitable warnings and cautions, all based on her sister’s desire to protect her. Instead, after a long moment, Kat had said, “Well, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” and then laughed. They both knew that left a pretty wide swath for Maddie to frolic in. After the call ended, Maddie had wondered if at last her sister was seeing her as a grown woman, able to take care of herself.
But that was nearly three weeks ago. Now Maddie’s unrest was edging toward . . . not panic—Kat was a grown woman and often traveled—but something close. Three weeks without a call wasn’t alarming, but it was unusual. She thought of her sister, alone in DC. What if she had fallen in her apartment? The bathroom, site of unforgiving surfaces, cast-iron tubs, glass doors, and fatal accidents. Unbidden, a picture came to mind: Kat, facedown in the bath, her hair matted with blood. Or lying on her bed, eyes open, mouth distorted in the rictus of death. Kat was only forty-four, but women younger than that died. Strokes. Heart attacks. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.
Other scenarios crowded in, brutal images born of a thousand headlines. Muggings and murders were common events in Washington. Kat had told her this herself, had, in fact, written a feature cautioning about the dangers of being a woman alone in the city. The piece had been filled with advice on how to stay safe: advice Maddie knew that Kat, being Kat, didn’t always follow.
She imagined her sister’s body lying on a street or on a shadowed, grassy strip at the Mall where Kat sometimes ran. Or dead, hidden by the brush along the running path by the canal in Georgetown. Maddie wiped her hand over her eyes as if this simple gesture could erase fear. Momentarily, she considered calling the DC police or one of the hospitals in the area, but at the thought of making such a call, she convinced herself she was overreacting, not being realistic. Surely if something had really happened to Kat, someone would have been in touch with Maddie by now. No, Kat was away on a freelance assignment and, being Kat, had become consumed with work. The answer was as simple as that. Maddie was overreacting out of her own neediness. She took a Ambien and went to bed. Things were always better in the morning. Daylight had the power to wash away worries that the night gave birth to.
Except in the morning, Maddie again felt the anxiety, which now lay separated by only a whisper from more full-blown alarm. Was Kat all right? Who would know? Who could she call? She realized with a start that the list was short. Kat’s work was freelance so there were no colleagues she could check in with. As for friends, at one point she would have known of a dozen people to phone, but now she knew fewer of Kat’s friends. Somehow, without her being conscious of it, their worlds had drifted apart. Perhaps Izzy would know something. Why hadn’t she thought of her before?
The DC row house had been divided in half. The other flat belonged to an older woman whom Kat had befriended, an overweight widow on a federal pension who had the improbable name of Isadora Duncan, although she looked no more like her namesake than a straw resembled a beer keg. Izzy’s hygiene was questionable, and the one or two times Maddie had accompanied Kat there she had noticed the trash contained a suspiciously high number of empty wine bottles, but for reasons incomprehensible to Maddie, Kat adored her. “Old Izzy likes her sherry,” Kat had once said, “but she’s all right. She’s a survivor. I’ve learned a lot about life from her.”
She dug out Izzy’s number. She let it ring and ring but there was no answer, not even voice mail. She considered calling Carl, but hesitated. There had to be someone else. She had never grown close to either of Kat’s husbands. The first had lasted only two months. You can barely count that as a marriage, Kat used to say. More like a blind date carried too far. Carl, her second husband, lasted longer. Maddie had a deeper dislike of Carl, a senate lawyer who carried himself with a cocky self-importance she associated with that profession. His family had owned the parking franchise at a Maryland racetrack, a business that, according to Kat, brought in a truly astonishing amount of money. Maddie had pegged him as a bully early on and was surprised when Kat married him. For a smart woman her sister was clueless in her choice of a husband and in the prenup she’d agreed to.
She didn’t want to call him and tried to convince herself Kat was fine, but eventually, around noon, her concern for her sister outweighed her reluctance. She still had the number for Carl’s home in Maryland in her old address book. It occurred to her he might have moved, but she remembered his virulence during the divorce and how he had pronounced that he had designed the place himself—his dream house—and that Kat would get it over his dead body. He had been beyond acrimonious. He had been vicious, a part of his personality he had kept hidden. M
addie had tried to talk about it to Kat—had he been abusive?—but Kat shook off that question. “Here’s the thing about Carl,” she finally said when Maddie kept pushing. “He can’t stand a woman who disagrees with him. About anything. He doesn’t want anyone to outshine him. He doesn’t want any demands. The surest way to incur his wrath is to stand up to him.” Maddie, remembering how Carl could turn on the charm when he chose to, said, “Sounds like Jekyll and Hyde.” Kat had laughed. “It’s not like I didn’t see the red flags waving from the start. I just chose to ignore them. Oh, well. Free now and moving forward.”
The phone rang twice before a woman answered. Her voice was thin and slightly nasal. Young. Kat’s replacement. Maddie wondered if she was malleable, agreeable, undemanding.
“Is Carl there?”
“Who’s calling?”
“Maddie DiMarco.”
“Hold on.” The clicking of high heels faded off—who wore high heels at home?—replaced in a minute by heavy footsteps and then Carl’s voice, as big and beefy as he was. “Hello.”
“Hi, Carl.” She could imagine his mouth already tightened in impatience.
“What can I do for you?” His voice was smooth. His professional voice.
“I’m sorry to bother you. It’s Kat. I’m worried about her. I’ve been trying to reach her, but there’s never an answer. Have you talked to her lately?”
He barked a curt laugh. “Not likely. Your sister and I are no longer in communication.”
“I tried her neighbor but didn’t get an answer. I didn’t know who else to call. I’m really concerned about her. It isn’t like her to not be in touch.”
His smooth veneer dropped like a stage curtain. “Well, as I said, I don’t know anything about her, and take it from me, kid, worrying about your sister is a royal waste of time. If there’s one thing Kat knows how to do, it’s how to take care of herself.”
The Orchid Sister Page 7
